


A Different Place

by MyOwnSuperintendent



Series: A Different Place [1]
Category: The X-Files
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode: S04e01 Herrenvolk, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 09:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16194332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MyOwnSuperintendent/pseuds/MyOwnSuperintendent
Summary: Herrenvolk AU.  When Mulder successfully brings one of the Samantha clones back from the farm with him, she must learn to adapt to a different life.





	A Different Place

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own The X-Files or anything related to it. I also don't own the first sentences of either Frog and Toad Are Friends or A Wrinkle in Time. Hope you enjoy!

He keeps looking back.  Every minute, while they drive.  She fidgets.  She’s seen people driving tractors and she knows you’re not supposed to look back.

He keeps saying things too.  “You’re going to be okay,” he tells her, and “You’re coming back with me,” and, once, “I can’t believe it’s you.”  His voice is soft, but she doesn’t understand what he means.  She doesn’t understand any of it.  She doesn’t know why she’s here and none of the others.  They keep going and going.

When they stop, finally, he gets out of the car first.  She doesn’t do anything because she doesn’t know if she’s supposed to.  She stays in the back until he comes around and opens the door.  He puts his hand on her head, softly, and then he puts his arms around her, for a long time.  No one’s ever done that.

He takes her into a building that’s not like any place she’s ever seen.  Mostly she knows the house.  And the apiaries.  He’s holding on to her hand.  He keeps looking at her still.  Every second.  Maybe there’s something wrong, or maybe that’s just his job.

There’s a woman coming towards them.  “Mulder,” she says.  “Mulder, I’ve been…”  And then she stops, looks at her.  Everyone is looking.  “Is that…?” she asks, and the man nods, and she just keeps staring.  “How?” she says.  “Mulder, how?”

“I don’t know,” he says.  “Not entirely.”

The woman stoops down.  “Hi,” she says.  “My name’s Dana Scully.  I work with your…I work with Mulder.”  She looks back at her.

“She doesn’t…she doesn’t talk,” the man—Mulder—says.  He’s still holding her hand.  “How’s my…how’s our mom doing?”

The woman—Dana Scully—shakes her head.  “She’s not awake yet, Mulder.  But we can go in.”

They go into another room, where there’s another woman.  She’s sleeping.  They sit there for a while.  Mulder and Dana Scully keep looking at her.

“She might be…are you hungry, sweetheart?” Dana Scully says to her.  “Have you had anything to eat?”

“Not since we left, anyway,” Mulder says.

“I could take her down to the cafeteria,” Dana Scully says.  “If you want to stay with your mom.”

Mulder looks between them, her and the woman on the bed.  “No, I’ll come with you,” he says, getting up from the chair.  “Let’s get something to eat, Samantha.”  And then, after a minute, “Come on,” and he holds his hand out again.  Maybe she is Samantha.  She lets him take her hand.

They go into another room, where they get to walk in a line.  She likes that.  Mulder and Dana Scully show her the food.  “What do you want to eat?” they ask her, and she points at an apple.  Mulder gets her the apple and a bag of some yellow things.  She chews on one and it breaks between her teeth.  She eats them all, but she doesn’t know what they are.

When they go back up to the room, the other woman is awake.  Mulder looks at her with tears in his eyes.  “Hi, Mom,” he says.  “Look who came with me.”  And the woman looks at her and starts to cry too, and when she’s close to the bed she grabs her and holds her tight.

“Samantha, Samantha,” she keeps saying.  They both said it, and so she must be Samantha now.

 

They ride in a car again, her and Mulder and Dana Scully.  Mulder told her they’re going to somewhere called Washington.  The other woman, whose name is Mom, is sick so she’s going to stay here for a while.  Samantha doesn’t know why.  Usually when someone is sick they just disappear.

The place where they end up is different too.  The building isn’t too big, but once they go inside they get into a box that moves.  She doesn’t like that much, but then they get out of the box and walk down the hall and go into another room.  There’s a kitchen, but it’s not very clean.  Everything at the first place, where she met Dana Scully and Mom and ate the yellow things, was very clean.  She liked that better.

“Well, this is home, Samantha,” Mulder says.  “At least for now.  We’ll…well, I’m going to look for a bigger place, now that you’re here.”  She wonders if that means more land outside.  There are a lot of buildings close together here.  “Or maybe we’ll go back with Mom, when she’s better.  But for now, let me clean out my room, okay?  And you can sleep there.  I’ll sleep out here.”  In the kitchen? she wonders.  He smiles at her again and goes into another room.

Samantha stays there with Dana Scully, who smiles at her too.  “Should we go sit on the couch?” she asks, and they do.  “This must be really strange for you,” she says.  It is different.  But it must be where she’s supposed to be now.  “But you know, Mulder is so happy to have you here.  He’s been…well, he’s been looking for you for a long time.  Well, I know, not you exactly, but…”  She stops, shrugs her shoulders.  “He’s so happy to have you here,” she says again.  “And I know he and your mom…they’re going to take care of you now, okay?  They want to give you a really good life.”  Samantha looks back at her.  “I’m sure it must feel different now,” Dana Scully says.  “But Mulder cares about you so much.”  She doesn’t know what Dana Scully is talking about.  She looks at one of her braids—they’re coming loose.  She wants to make them neat again.

She undoes the braids.  Sometimes they would do each other’s braids, but she can do her own too.  She runs her fingers through them.  It would be easier with a brush and comb.  Dana Scully looks at her for a minute, and then she goes into the other room too.  When she comes back, she has a comb, and she gives it to Samantha.  She takes it and combs her hair, and then she fixes her braids so they’re neat again.  Like they should be.

“You do that so fast,” Dana Scully says to her.  “I’ve never been great at that kind of thing.”  She’s sitting next to Samantha again, and Samantha moves over and starts to comb her hair too.  “Oh,” Dana Scully says.  “Oh…I didn’t mean you had to…”  She stops talking then and smiles at Samantha again, and Samantha combs her hair so it’s neat too.  Her hair isn’t very long, but Samantha makes a small braid, right behind her ear.

When she looks up, Mulder is in the room again.  He’s watching them very carefully.  He seems to do that a lot. 

“Thank you, Samantha,” Dana Scully says softly.  She pats her hand and gets up from the couch.  “I should go home now,” she says.  “But I’ll see you both again soon.”

“Bye, Scully,” Mulder says.  He hugs her quickly.  “Thank you for…all this.”

“Of course,” she says.  “Any time.”  She waves at Samantha.  “Bye, Samantha,” she says, and then she walks out the door. 

Samantha stares after her.  She doesn’t understand.  Mulder said this was home.  But then Dana Scully said she would go home and she left. 

Mulder comes over to her and puts a hand on her shoulder.  “She’ll be back,” he tells her. “We’ll see her tomorrow, probably.  You’ll like Scully a lot.  She’s great.”  Samantha looks at him, and he starts to say something, then stops and shakes his head.  “I keep forgetting you can’t talk to me,” he says.  “I keep forgetting a lot about this, Sam…It’s a weird situation.  But none of it’s your fault.”  He stoops down and hugs her too.  She doesn’t know where to put her arms.  “I don’t quite know how to do this,” he tells her.  “But I promise you I’ll figure it out.  I’m really glad you’re here.”  That’s the same as what Dana Scully said.  “I’ll make us dinner now,” he says.  “Okay?”

He makes them spaghetti.  Every time he finishes with a utensil, while he’s cooking, she takes it and washes it.  You always clean up as you go.  “Hey, what’re you doing?” he says, the first time, but she just keeps washing them.  “I don’t usually keep a lot of fresh stuff,” he tells her.  “It goes bad fast, when we’re on the road.  But we can go grocery shopping tomorrow.  We can get stuff you like.” 

“Do you want to go to sleep?” he asks her, after they eat.  “We’ve had a long day.”  It is probably time to sleep, she thinks.  To rejuvenate.  She lies down in the next room, on the bed he shows her.  “You don’t even have pajamas,” he says.  “God, I’m sorry, Sam.  I didn’t expect…This isn’t how I pictured this.”  She’s already almost asleep.  “We’ll get that stuff tomorrow too,” he’s saying.  “I promise,” and then she’s asleep.

When her sleep is done it’s still dark in the room.  She can hear cars outside.  She walks to the door of the room and looks for Mulder.  She sees him on the couch.  He’s asleep, still.

She doesn’t need to sleep anymore, so she decides that it’s time to work.  She makes the bed first, with hospital corners.  Then she looks around until she finds a broom and rags and cleaning spray.  She does as much of the bedroom and the bathroom as she can.  She would like to vacuum but she doesn’t because Mulder is asleep.

She’s working on the kitchen—she has to stand on a chair, because everything is high up here, it’s not like before when everything was the right height—when Mulder wakes up.  He blinks at her.  “Samantha,” he says.  “Samantha, what are you doing?”  She holds up the rag. 

He comes over to her.  “Samantha,” he says, “that’s not your job.  It’s four in the morning and that’s not your job.”  But it’s always been her job.  What is her job now, if that’s not her job?

 

Later that morning, Dana Scully comes back, and the three of them go out.  “We’ve got to get you some clothes,” Mulder says to her, and they drive to a place where there are a lot of clothes.  She’s never seen so many, and she doesn’t know why she would need them all.  Don’t they wash clothes, here?

“Do you see anything you like?” Dana Scully asks her, but she doesn’t know.  There are too many things.  “Colors, maybe?”

“How about purple?” Mulder asks.  “Do you still like purple?”  She thinks about it.  She does like purple.  She nods, and he smiles at her. 

They pick out some clothes—a purple t-shirt, a pair of pajamas.  Dana Scully asks her if she wants help trying things on, but she shakes her head.  She doesn’t need any help.  She’s glad when it’s all over.

When they’re on their way back to the car, Mulder says, “We could stop in at the bookstore, if you like.  Do you want to do that, Sam?”  She stares back at him.  She doesn’t know what he means, bookstore.  “Can you read?” he asks her, and his voice is soft, but she doesn’t know what that means either.

“Let’s go in,” Dana Scully says; her voice is soft too.  “Maybe we could read to you, Samantha.”  She nods.  She thinks she’s supposed to.  When they go in, she stands there and listens to them talking.  They say things like, “This is a good one,” and “I remember I used to love this one,” and “She liked this one.  Back when we…”  They buy things here too.  After that they go to a store with food—she knows what that is, anyway—and then they go back to the building that Mulder said was home. 

This night is like the last one, which makes her feel better.  Dana Scully leaves, and Samantha and Mulder eat together.  “How about I read to you?” he asks her, afterwards.  “From one of the books we got?”  This seems to be an important thing, these books, and reading, so she nods.

They sit on the couch together.  He’s holding a bunch of papers, with a picture of frogs on them.  He turns the paper over, to one with a lot of marks on it.  “Frog ran up the path to Toad’s house,” he says.  “He knocked on the front door…” 

At first, she doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  He’s telling her all about this frog and this toad, but she doesn’t know who they are; they’re not here, and they talk, which is strange, and she wonders if they’re even real, or how he knows so much about them.  But she watches him, turning the papers over, looking down at them, and eventually she works it out: the papers—the book—must be telling him something.  This must be how he knows about Frog and Toad.  And then she starts to get interested, because Frog and Toad are funny; she wants to know what else they’re going to do.  When the story ends she turns over the paper, like he’s been doing, to see if there’s any more.  And there is.  Four more stories.  He keeps looking at her, smiling at her, every time he turns over the paper.

Before she goes to sleep he gives her a hug again. 

 

The next time she wakes up she hears him talking.  She goes to the door of the room, to see if anyone else is there.  But no one is.  He’s just talking to himself.

“…hope I’m not keeping you up,” he says.  “Yeah.  Yeah, it was good.  I read her _Frog and Toad_.”  He’s quiet for a minute.  “And she really liked it.  She always did, you know.  It was one of her favorites.”  Quiet again.  She stands in the doorway, wearing the new purple pajamas, listening. 

“I know.  I know, Scully,” he says.  “But I know and I don’t, if that makes any sense.  It’s hard to convince myself that she’s not Samantha when she looks exactly like Samantha.  And she likes the same things.”  She frowns to herself.  Who’s not Samantha?  She thought she was Samantha.  “Believe me, I’ve noticed,” he says.  “The whole not talking, it throws me.  And last night—last night she got up at four in the morning and cleaned the whole apartment.”  He laughs.  “Very funny.”  Why is he saying all these things about her?  She knows, now, that cleaning the apartment is not her job, because he told her that.  But nobody has told her what her job is.  Maybe it’s listening to the books.  She would like that, she thinks.  “I’ve thought about it,” he says.  “Of course I have.  But we have to be really careful, Scully.  I can’t lose her again…I just can’t.”  He’s quiet again.  “But I know what you mean.  I want her to have whatever’s best for her…Thanks.  Thank you, Scully.  It means a lot…I’ll let you sleep now.  We’ll talk soon.” 

He turns around then and jumps when he sees her standing in the door.  “Samantha,” he says.  “You awake again?”  She nods.  Obviously she is.  “I hope I didn’t wake you up,” he says.  He didn’t, so she shakes her head. 

He walks over to her and smiles.  “We’re neither of us great at sleeping, I guess,” he says.  “Do you want me to read to you some more?  Maybe you’ll get tired.”  She liked the reading before.  She nods.

He looks through the books they got.  “Scully picked this one for you,” he says, holding one up.  It looks bigger than _Frog and Toad_.  “She said it was one of her favorites, when she was your age.”

They go back into the bedroom; he puts the blankets around her, gently.  Then he opens the book.  “It was a dark and stormy night,” he says. 

She’s never heard anything like this before.  The book is about a girl called Meg and a boy called Charles Wallace and someone called their father, who is missing.  And three women who help her.  Mulder keeps looking over at her as he reads, still.  “Aren’t you tired yet?” he asks her, yawning, and she shakes her head.  She turns over the page for him, so he’ll keep going.

He falls asleep himself, though, right when Meg and Charles Wallace are looking for their father and she really wants to hear more.  She puts the blankets over him, and then she takes the book.  She looks at all the marks on the page.  She wants to do what Mulder does, so she doesn’t have to wait for him to wake up, so she can know what they mean.

 

The woman called Mom is here now.  She brought Samantha a lot of things, in a couple of boxes.  More clothes and books.  They all smell old.

She puts on one of the outfits—it’s a yellow jumper, with tights and a sweater that match.  They’re striped.  Mulder and Mom both stare at her when she wears it. 

There’s a little person in one of the boxes too, made out of cloth.  She looks at it and then puts it back in.  She doesn’t think she likes it.

“Come sit with me, Samantha,” Mom says, and so she goes over to the couch and sits down.  “You don’t know how happy I am to have you back,” she says, and she gives Samantha a hug.  She does that a lot.

“Mom,” Mulder says, “you know she’s not exactly—”

“She is,” Mom says.  “In the ways that matter.  She’s my daughter.”  She looks very upset, and Mulder doesn’t say anything else.  “And you’re happy to be with us too,” she says to Samantha.  “Aren’t you, honey?”  Samantha thinks about it.  It’s still different.  She used to be like all the others and no one stared at her or asked her questions.  Now it’s just her and they stare at her and ask her questions all the time.  And she never knows what she’s supposed to do.  But she likes the books.  And she thinks they want her to be happy.  “Won’t you talk to me, honey?” Mom asks.  “I wish you would.”  She draws her legs up onto the couch and hugs them.  She would talk if she could, like they all do.  But she can’t.

“She can’t, Mom,” Mulder says.  “Don’t press her.”  He comes and sits down on the couch with them.  “We should talk about what we’re going to do, though.  For the future.”

“You two won’t come back?” she asks.  “To the house with me?”

“That’s what I want to talk about,” Mulder says.  “I thought you might want to move down here.  Not here here, obviously,” he adds, looking around.  “There’s not enough space even now.  But we could get a place.  Somewhere nicer.  We could have a yard for you, Sam,” he says, smiling at her.  She smiles back.  She likes that.  She misses being outside. 

“Well, maybe,” Mom says.  She’s not smiling.

“I thought…it could be a fresh start,” he says.  “Not somewhere we’ve lived before.” 

“But you don’t want…”  Mom stops.  Now she’s the one who isn’t talking, Samantha thinks.  “You don’t want to…go back?” she finally says.  “Try again?  So that it could be like…”

Mulder’s quiet for a minute too.  “Mom,” he says softly.  He reaches across Samantha and touches Mom’s hand.  “It can’t be like that.  Maybe it would be nice if it could, but it can’t.  Too much has happened.  And she’s not…you know she’s not…and I’m not, anyway.”  He smiles but it doesn’t look like his smile usually does, like when he reads _A Wrinkle in Time_ to her at night.  “We’re not the same people we were, back then.  That’s why I thought…a fresh start.  Nothing that would make us want to compare.  Well, any more than we already would.”  She doesn’t say anything.  “Just think about it,” he says.  She nods her head.  “And then there are other things we have to think about,” he says.  “School for her.”

“You think we should send her to school?” Mom asks.  From the way she sounds, Samantha thinks school could be something horrible.  But she doesn’t think Mulder would want to send her to something horrible.

“Well, I don’t think it would be right to keep her out,” Mulder says.  “I brought her back here so she could have a good life.  A normal life.”

“I just…I don’t want to let anything happen,” Mom says.  She holds Samantha tightly, an arm around her shoulders.

“I know,” Mulder says.  “I don’t either.  But we can’t…I don’t want to be selfish, either.  She should have school.  She should have everything that she missed before.”  From the way he’s looking at her, she’s not sure if he’s really talking about her.  She’s figured this much out by now: there was another Samantha.  A Samantha who’s gone, now that she’s Samantha.  But sometimes the two of them get mixed up.

 

Dana Scully comes over in the morning, to stay with her.  “Mom and I are going to look into some things,” Mulder tells her, before he says goodbye.  “For when we move.  And when you start school.  We’ll be back soon and we’ll tell you all about it, okay?”  He kisses her cheek.  “I love you, Sam.  Have a good time with Scully.”

“Oh, we will,” Dana Scully says.

They’re outside now, walking to the park.  They were in the apartment for a while, but there wasn’t so much to do there.  She’d be happy cleaning, but nobody else likes it when she does that.  She could have had Dana Scully read more of _A Wrinkle in Time_ to her, but when she brought it over, Dana Scully said, “I think Mulder wants to read that with you, honey.”  And then she suggested going to the park, and Samantha thought that sounded like a good idea.  So now they’re going.

“Did your mom bring you that dress?” Dana Scully asks her.  She’s wearing the yellow one again, from the boxes.  She nods.  “I thought so,” Dana Scully says.  “I had one kind of like that.  When I was nine.”  She tries to think about Dana Scully being nine.  They had the same kind of dress, and she liked _A Wrinkle in Time_ too.  Maybe they were alike.

They get to the park.  There’s concrete there, and a lot of grass, and some plastic structures.  She doesn’t know what they’re for.  “What do you want to do?” Dana Scully asks her, and she shakes her head.  She doesn’t know.  Usually when she was outside before, she would do chores.  Dana Scully looks at her, and then at a place on the concrete where there are some markings.  “Do you know how to play hopscotch?” she asks.  Samantha shakes her head again.  “Then I’ll show you,” she says.

She picks up a stone and throws it at the markings.  Then she hops along them, in between the lines.  “It’s fun,” she says, once she hops back.  “I haven’t played it in a long time.  Do you want to try?”  Samantha’s not sure what it all means, but she nods.

Dana Scully shows her where to throw the stone: into the first square, where there’s a line marked.  “You have to hop over that one,” she says.  “And you pick up your stone on the way back.”  So she hops. 

Dana Scully doesn’t talk a lot while they’re hopping, back and forth along the squares.  Samantha doesn’t mind that.  People are always talking to her now, and it’s hard, when she can’t talk back to them.  They never used to talk, before; they just got on with things.  Sometimes she thinks it’s better, the not talking.  Except for _A Wrinkle in Time_.  And _Frog and Toad Are Friends_.  But right now, she likes the hopping, the rhythm. 

She does talk again, though, after they’re left the park, when they stop in another building to eat lunch.  She doesn’t know all the foods they have but Dana Scully orders her a grilled cheese sandwich and she eats it.  “How’re you doing?” Dana Scully asks her.  She doesn’t really know what that question means.  “This is still strange for you, isn’t it?” she asks, and Samantha nods, because she can answer that one at least.  It’s all very strange.

“That makes sense,” Dana Scully says.  “I’m sure it would be incredibly strange for me, in your place.  And I can’t…I don’t think that’s something that’s going to change, right away.”  She doesn’t sound like she thinks it’s Samantha’s job to make things not strange for herself.  That’s good, anyway.  “But Mulder loves you a lot,” she says.  “He’d want to know what he can do to make you happy.  I hope you know that.  Your mom too.”  She takes a bite of her own sandwich.  “I know that can’t make everything not strange,” she says.  “But I just thought I should tell you that.” 

Samantha tries to figure out if it does make anything less strange.  She’s not sure.  She never used to have people telling her things like this, _I love you he loves you we love you_.  She doesn’t know what that’s supposed to change. 

“Anyway,” Dana Scully says.  “Do you want dessert?”  They get a chocolate sundae.  It’s sweet on her tongue.  Sweeter than anything.  When they go back to the apartment Dana Scully says she’ll read her one of her other books, if she wants, and she nods but she can’t sit still during the reading.  She jumps up when she hears the door open.  It’s Mulder, back with Mom. 

“Hi, Samantha,” he says, giving her a hug when she comes over.  “You excited that we’re back?”  He’s smiling at her.  She doesn’t nod or shake her head because she isn’t sure.  Mom gives her a hug too, a long one.  “Did the two of you have a good time?” he asks.  She thinks about it and nods.  She liked the hopscotch.

Dana Scully goes home after that, and she sits on the couch with Mulder and Mom and they show her pictures of buildings, which they say are houses they could live in.  And one’s a school.  They keep asking her if she likes them.  She doesn’t know if she does.

 

Mulder takes her to another place to meet a woman named Maya.  “She’s a speech therapist,” he tells her, in the car.  “And she’s going to help you learn to talk.”  She’s going to talk now?  Like the rest of them?  “If you like her, of course,” Mulder says, glancing over at her.

Maya has a room with a lot of pictures and charts on the walls.  “Hi, Samantha,” she says, holding out a hand.  Samantha takes it, holds on until Maya takes hers away.  “It’s nice to meet you.  Your dad’s told me about you.”

“Brother,” Mulder says quickly, looking between the two of them.  “I’m her brother.”

“Sorry, my mistake,” Maya says.  “Anyway, we’re going to do some exercises, okay?  To help you.”  She looks over at Mulder, who gets up from his chair. 

“I’ll be right outside, okay, Samantha?” he says.  “And we’ll go home after this.”  She nods.  She doesn’t mind if he goes, especially if he’s going to be right outside.  He doesn’t seem to want to, though.  But he does, eventually.

The exercises aren’t very easy.  But she tries.  Maya shows her some charts, pictures of mouths making different shapes for different sounds, and she stares at them, trying to form her mouth like the pictures.  She wants to learn.  She doesn’t like not being able to do it.  There were never things she didn’t understand, never things she didn’t do right, until she came here.

That night, after Mulder reads to her, after he falls asleep, she takes out the copies of the charts that Maya gave her and takes them into the bathroom.  She looks at the pictures of the mouths and then stands in front of the mirror, making the same shapes.  She tries to make the sounds, even just to whisper them.

When she finally makes a sound, just a little quiet _o_ , around three in the morning, she jumps back from the mirror.  Is that what she sounds like?  Is that her voice?  She’s not sure if she likes it.  Maybe she does or maybe she doesn’t, she thinks, but either way it’s new, and somehow that makes her start to cry, standing there in the bathroom.  That’s something new too; she can hear herself crying, louder and harder the more she goes on.

She hears Mulder, too, getting up from the couch, coming in to find her.  “Samantha, what is it?” he says.  She can see his face behind her in the mirror, looking worried.  “What happened?  Why are you up?  Are you okay?”

“O,” she says, “o, o, o,” and she cries and cries, and she doesn’t know if he even realizes what this means, but he holds her tight.

 

She’s the one to open the door, when Dana Scully comes over.  “Hi,” she says. 

“Hi, Samantha,” Dana Scully says, and then she starts, and then she smiles.  “You just said hi to me, didn’t you?” she asks, and when Samantha nods she says, “So it’s going well?  With Maya?”  Samantha nods again.  “That’s great.”

“She’s doing really well,” Mulder says.  “Maya said…what was it she said, Sam?  You’re making unusually fast progress?”

“Yesss,” Samantha says.  She concentrates on the s because it sometimes gives her trouble. 

“Listen to that,” Mom says.  “Aren’t you smart, honey?” 

“Yesss,” she says, because she thinks she probably is, to learn all this unusually fast, and she doesn’t know why Mom laughs, because she was the one who asked. 

“Are you ready to go, Mulder?” Dana Scully asks. 

“Yeah,” he says.  “Just give me a minute to get my jacket.  Is there anything the two of you need, before we go?” he asks her and Mom.  She shakes her head.

“We’ll be fine,” Mom says.  “Maybe we can go out somewhere too.  Would you like that, Samantha?”  She nods.

“Well, then I’ll see you both soon,” Mulder says.  “After work.”  He hugs them both before he and Dana Scully leave.

The place Samantha and Mom end up going is called the zoo.  It’s a very strange place, as far as Samantha is concerned.  It’s full of animals; she’s used to animals, from before, and also she’s seen them in some of her books, but these ones are different.  She doesn’t know what kind a lot of them are—Mom has to tell her all the names—and then they aren’t really using them for anything, like milk or wool.  Maybe they do that part somewhere else, where people can’t see.  But Mom keeps saying the animals are cute and asking her if she’s having fun, so she guesses she’s supposed to be.  “Yes,” she keeps saying, “yes, yes,” and they walk around looking at all the animals.  And Mom buys her a grape popsicle.  When she looks in the mirror in the bathroom her tongue is purple.  She says her name, slowly and quietly, in front of the mirror with her purple tongue.

“Did you have a good day?” Mom asks her, when they’re on the way back home.

“Yes,” she says.  It’s a little harder to talk now because she’s tired.

“Are you all right, honey?” Mom asks her, and when she just nods she says, “Are you sure?”  She nods again.

Mom asks her that kind of thing a lot.  Mulder too, but Mom even more.

 

The three of them are in the car, because Mulder and Mom found a house for them to look at.  “I think you’ll like this place, Samantha,” Mulder said to her.  “There’s a lot of space.” 

The house is white, with a brown roof and a big porch.  There is a lot of space around it—they have to drive down a long road to get there, and when she gets out of the car she sees there’s even more space, in the back.  It reminds her of before, kind of.

“Should we have a look inside?” Mom asks.  She takes Samantha’s hand.

“Yes,” Samantha says. 

There’s space inside too, rooms for all of them.  “So we can all be here,” Mom says.

“And there’s space to roam around too,” Mulder adds, “for people who like to get up in the middle of the night.”  Mom frowns, but Mulder grins at Samantha, and she smiles back. 

They walk in the yard, afterwards, and she runs fast, like she hasn’t done in a long time.  Maybe they could play hopscotch here, like Dana Scully showed her, on that long driveway.

Mom and Mulder are watching her run.  “What do you think, Sam?” Mulder asks her when she comes back.

She thinks about it.  “Good,” she says.

 

She goes to sleep with boxes in the room around her, because they’re moving soon.  She still has her things on the table next to her, though— _Frog and Toad Are Friends_ , and some paper and colored pencils.  Mulder told her she should keep them there for when she wakes up in the night, so she has something to do and doesn’t have to get up and clean.  She can’t read _Frog and Toad Are Friends_ yet, even though she wants to, but she likes to look at the pictures.

When she wakes up tonight, she hears Mulder talking.  “No, don’t apologize,” he’s saying.  “I don’t mind.  We should keep our voices down, that’s all.  Samantha’s awake half the night sometimes.”

“And that’s…okay?”  Dana Scully’s voice.  Samantha wonders why she’s here, in the middle of the night.

“It doesn’t seem to hurt her,” Mulder says.  “Here, sit down.  Did you want to talk about something?”  Samantha sits up in bed, listening, but she doesn’t turn on the light.  She doesn’t hear anything right now, though—they’re both quiet.

“I guess I was just wondering,” Dana Scully finally says.  “Is this the end?”

“The end of what?” Mulder asks.

“I’m not sure I know,” Dana Scully says.  “The work?”

They’re quiet again.  “It doesn’t have to be the end,” Mulder says.

“Do you really think that, though?” Dana Scully asks.  “You’ve found Samantha.  In a way,” she adds quickly.  “And either way you have a little girl to take care of.  And your mom’s here now, and you’re moving.  I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted it to be the end.  It’s always been your fight.”

“Don’t say that,” Mulder says.  “You know I don’t think—”

“I know, I know,” Dana Scully says.  “I’m in it too, now.  But still…don’t think you’d be letting me down.”  They’re quiet for so long that Samantha wonders if they left, or fell asleep, or something.

Mulder’s voice sounds different, when he talks again.  “If that’s the way you feel about it.”

“Mulder, no,” Dana Scully says.  “That’s not what I meant at all.  You know that.”  Her voice sounds different too, much less calm than usual.  “Look, Mulder, everything’s changed for you now.  And that’s great, and I don’t want to hold you back from that.  That’s what I meant.”

“Well, you don’t sound—”

“Don’t tell me how I sound,” Dana Scully says.  “What do you want me to say?  I am happy for you.  I hope you believe that.  And I won’t blame you for whatever decision you make.  I’d just like to know what that’s going to be.  Because there’s the work, that’s one thing, and then there’s…”  She doesn’t finish her sentence, whatever it was going to be. 

“Scully—”

“I am happy for you,” she says again.  “I know you’re focused on Samantha right now, and that’s how it should be.  But I want to know what’s going to happen with us too.  With the work,” she says again.  “I mean with the work.”  Samantha can hear her getting up from the couch.  “This isn’t a good time, though,” she says.  “I should have thought about it more.  We can talk about it on Monday.  Good night.”  And Mulder says her name again, but Samantha can hear her walking, can hear the door of the apartment open and close.

She lies back down, but she thinks about what she just heard.  They were talking about her, at least a little.  Because Mulder’s focused on her, she guesses, but Dana Scully wants him to tell her what’s going to happen with them.  With the work.  Samantha knows they’ve worked together for a long time now.  Did she change things, now that she’s here?  Is it her fault?  Is that what Dana Scully thinks?

At breakfast she doesn’t really want to talk, even though she usually likes to talk, to practice.  Maya says she’s getting better and better.  She says Samantha is extraordinary.  Samantha practiced saying that word afterwards.  _Extraordinary_.  But this morning she doesn’t feel extraordinary, and she doesn’t feel like saying anything at all.  She concentrates on eating and on doing the dishes afterwards.  But Mulder looks at her when she’s drying them.  “What’s the matter?” he asks her.

“Dana Scully,” she says quietly.  “Mad?  At me?”

He looks surprised.  “What?” he asks.  “No, of course not.”  He comes over to her.  “Why would you think Scully was mad at you?”

“Last night,” she says.

“Last night?” he says, and then, “Oh.  You heard us talking?”  When she nods, he sighs.  “Sorry, Sam.  I’ve got to be more careful about that.  But no, she’s not mad at you.  It’s more like…”  He breaks off, sighs again.  “Come sit, okay?” he says, and they go to sit down on the couch.  “Scully and I are just figuring some things out,” he tells her.  “The work we do, it’s important to both of us, and the way I work is going to change a little, now that you’re here.  Because you’re important to me too, and because that’s what happens, when people have families.  But we will figure it out.  And Scully’s not mad at you, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Who did?” she asks.

“Who did?” he repeats.  “Well, no one did, Sam.  None of us, anyway.  It doesn’t always…there’s not always one person who’s right and one person who’s wrong.  Sometimes people just have to work together to figure things out.”  She looks at him, trying to understand, and he adds, “It’s hard for people sometimes, when they know things are going to be different from how they used to be.  But that doesn’t mean anyone did something wrong.”

“Different,” she says.  “Like me.  Here.”

“Yeah,” he says, “kind of like that, Sam.  I know it’s different for you here.  Especially at first, right?”  She nods.  “But it’s gotten better,” he says, and then he stops and looks at her.  “Hasn’t it?” he asks, and he sounds like he’s really not sure.

“Yes,” she says, because it has, and his face relaxes, and he smiles at her. 

“Good,” he says.  “And it’ll be a little different for me and Scully, but we’ll get used to it too.  So you don’t have to worry.”

Then he hugs her, and that’s something that’s different, she thinks, because no one ever hugged her before him, and now they hug her a lot.  But it’s a good kind of different.

 

Dana Scully comes over and has dinner with them, the last night before they move.  She helps them do the last bits of packing, even though Samantha doesn’t really need help.  “It will be different,” Samantha tells her.  “But it will be okay.”

“What will, Samantha?” Dana Scully asks her.  “The new house?”

“No,” Samantha says.  “You and Mulder.  The work.”  Dana Scully sounded sad, the other night, and maybe if Samantha tells her what Mulder said she’ll feel better.

Right now, though, she just looks confused, and then she turns around and makes a face at Mulder.  “Are the two of you discussing our work plans?”

“She heard us talking, Scully!” Mulder says.  “She asked!”

“And?”

“And I told her we were figuring some things out,” Mulder says, “but that it would be all right.”  He holds up his hands.  “I didn’t divulge your personal information,” he says, and Dana Scully rolls her eyes at him, but she’s smiling.

“Thank you for asking, Samantha,” she says.  She hands Samantha the last shirt, and Samantha folds it up small and neat.  “You’re right—it is going to be a little different.  But Mulder and I will still work together.  And we’ll still see each other plenty.  I’m going to come out to the new house and see all of you sometimes, okay? How does that sound?”

“Good,” Samantha says, and she’s glad, because Dana Scully is smiling, and she definitely doesn’t sound mad.  “We can hopscotch.”  That’s a hard word to say, with a lot of sounds, but she gets it right.

“We can,” Dana Scully says.  Samantha zips her suitcase closed.

 

They’re at the new house, for the first time.  Now they live here.  For dinner that night, she helps Mom make a meatloaf by chopping up all the parsley.  And she puts together the salad.  She could do the whole thing by herself—it would be easy—but she knows Mom likes to do most of it.  So she just does those parts.  Mulder tells her the food is really good.

Mom sits with her in her room after dinner, and they start taking her things out of their boxes, putting books on the shelves and clothes in the drawers.  She tries not to go too fast, because she might want to do some more of it in the middle of the night.  Mom hangs up a purple dress that she’s never worn; it was in one of the boxes that Mom brought her back at the apartment.  “You wore this on your birthday,” she says.  “Sorry.  She did.”

The other Samantha, again.  She doesn’t know everything yet, but she knows she makes Mom remember.

“I will wear it,” she says.  “On my birthday.”  She thinks for a minute.  “When is that?”

Mom smiles.  “Well, I’m not really sure,” she says.  “Hers was in January.  So we could celebrate yours then.  Or we could pick a different day.  Maybe when Fox found you.”  She would like that, she thinks, getting to pick her own birthday.  “You don’t have to wear the dress, though.  Only if you like.”

“I will,” she says again.

“If you like,” Mom says, and she comes over to where Samantha is unpacking her books.  “You can wear anything you want,” she says, and then she hugs Samantha for a long time, and she’s crying a little, Samantha sees. 

“Are you sad?” Samantha asks.

“No,” Mom says.  “No, I’m happy that we’re here.”

When she’s ready for bed, Mulder comes in to read _A Wrinkle in Time_ with her.  They’ve read it almost four times already, but she doesn’t get tired of it.  She even knows some of the parts by heart.  She hopes she’ll be able to read it herself, soon.

Tonight they’re reading the part at the end, where Meg gets Charles Wallace back, because she loves him so much.  That’s Mulder’s favorite part, Samantha knows.  (Hers is when Mrs. Whatsit turns into the winged centaur.)  He doesn’t exactly cry when he reads it, but his voice gets funny. 

When they come to the end, he kisses her on the cheek and puts the book down.  “We can start again tomorrow if you want,” he says.  “Good night, Samantha.”

“Good night, Mulder,” she says.

He stops in the door, about to turn off the light.  “You can call me Fox, you know,” he says.  “Since we’re both Mulders, after all.”

“Okay,” she says, and then he turns off the light and goes, and she thinks about what he said for a while, until she falls asleep.

 

_Sixteen Months Later_

Samantha’s the one who finds her, wedged into the linen closet.  She doesn’t tell anyone, just slides in there too.  “Hi,” she says.  “Are you hiding?”  No answer.  “Are you scared?”  No answer again.  Samantha doesn’t mind that.  Silence is familiar to her, even now.

“It makes sense, if you’re scared,” she says.  “I was worried, at first.  When I came to live with Fox and Mom.  Because it was really different.”

Emily stirs next to her.  “Did your mommy and daddy…did they…?”  She looks sad; her eyes look big.

“I didn’t have any, before,” she says.  “I lived on a farm.  It was only kids like me.”  Sometimes she sees them in her dreams, as clear as day, all the boys just the same, all the girls just like her.  That was once the way it was, her life, and now it’s a different way.  “So it was really different, like I said.  But they were so nice to me, and now I’m not worried anymore.  And Dana will be really nice to you, too.”

“But I don’t want to go away,” Emily says, softly.  “I just want my mommy.”

“I know,” Samantha says.  “I’m sorry.”  She doesn’t know how to talk about this part: she hasn’t known anything like this.  So she just puts her arm around Emily.  “Dana will be your mom now,” she says.  “And she’s really, really nice.  We see her all the time.  She comes over a couple of times a week for dinner.  So when you come to live with Dana, you’ll come to our house with her,” she says, “and you’ll see us all the time too.  Me and Fox and Mom.  So you won’t be alone, or anything like that.  We can be friends.”  Emily’s younger than she is, but she doesn’t see that it matters, especially.  Most kids, even ones her age, seem young to her, never having lived like she used to live.  “Do you like books?  I love them.”  Emily nods a little.  “Well, then I can read to you,” Samantha says.  “Or we could draw pictures.  Or play hopscotch.  Dana’s the one who taught me to play.  And if you’re worried, she’ll understand,” she finishes up.  “She’ll want to help you.  So it’ll be okay.”

“Really?” Emily asks.

“Really,” Samantha says.  “I promise.”  They sit there for a minute.  “They’re wondering where you went, you know,” she says.  “Dana and everyone.  They’re looking for you.  Do you want to come back downstairs?”  Emily doesn’t say anything.  “With me?” Samantha adds.  She holds out her hand.

Emily looks at her for a minute.  “Okay,” she says, at last, and she takes Samantha’s hand. 

They go downstairs together, to join the others. 


End file.
